[HN Gopher] Scale of the Universe
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Scale of the Universe
Author : Leftium
Score : 215 points
Date : 2024-04-19 03:53 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scaleofuniverse.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scaleofuniverse.com)
| corinroyal wrote:
| OMFG! This is fantastic! And apparently I have some things to
| learn about web design.
| a_c wrote:
| Magnificent! Curious how the zoom interaction is managed? Do you
| load assets of next level once zoom level hit a certain
| threshold?
| Leftium wrote:
| My guess is all the assets are preloaded. They are gradually
| added to the "stage" and shrunken/faded out based on the zoom
| level on an item-by-item basis (vs zoom levels.)
|
| The background color would be its own "item."
|
| I actually came across this site because I was looking for an
| example for a proposal for a fun project for this guy:
| https://youtu.be/1kjvgWBHzec (he tried a couple of non-
| programming video editing methods to achieve the zoom effect.)
| vbezhenar wrote:
| It seems all images are stored in the file
| https://cdn.scaleofuniverse.com/sotu-avif.dave with some format
| I don't really know. It's some kind of container for avif
| images. It's loaded once.
| wruza wrote:
| See also:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb5qTdb6LbM < AGE of UNIVERSE >
| TIME in perspective
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA TIMELAPSE OF THE
| FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K)
| alok-g wrote:
| The second one is WOW. Thanks for sharing.
| someplaceguy wrote:
| > The second one is WOW.
|
| Indeed! Now assume that the many-worlds interpretation is
| accurate and you will live through most of that, if quantum
| immortality [1] turns out to apply to the real world.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immorta
| lit...
| necovek wrote:
| Looks lovely!
|
| Too bad there are no hits when searching for the "Restaurant at
| the end of the Universe" :)
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| This is amazing. I always have this thought experiment of taking
| this back like 200 years and imaging how people would react to
| the things we've discovered in our world and thinking about how
| much it would progress the technology of the era.
| redog wrote:
| You'd probably be persecuted and hung.
| kromem wrote:
| I would imagine they'd be more surprised about the smartphone
| in front of their faces.
|
| I just hope after extensive explanation and looking at the
| showcase they'd eventually ask what a Minecraft world was and
| why it was both flat and bigger than Earth.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| This is really moving! It's like a 2020s version of that old
| video[0] (there are 2!)[1] that zooms in and out of scale.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 (1977)
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44cv416bKP4 (1996)
| bogtog wrote:
| I think this Zoom in/out physics story has pretty widely been
| told. Here is one by CPG Grey:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI
|
| I like the one OP linked here. All the objects being clickable
| with a little description is nice
| pytness wrote:
| TIL the porcine virus is only ~106 carbon atoms wide.
| wdfx wrote:
| TIL that the Burj Khalifa is taller than Vatican City is wide.
| ralegh wrote:
| For a second I thought we'd seen a lot of the universe, the HDF
| being 1/5th the radius away and on googling Earandel is 2/3rds
| the radius... of the known universe.
|
| "According to the theory of cosmic inflation initially introduced
| by Alan Guth and D. Kazanas, if it is assumed that inflation
| began about 10-37 seconds after the Big Bang and that the pre-
| inflation size of the universe was approximately equal to the
| speed of light times its age, that would suggest that at present
| the entire universe's size is at least 1.5x1034 light-years--at
| least 3x10^23 times the radius of the observable universe."
|
| So, if true, all those metrics of atoms, stars, planets in the
| known universe are multiplied by 10^23.
|
| Even if intelligent life were rare enough to only appear once per
| knowable universe, there could be 10^23 different intelligent
| species - single planet to galaxy spanning empires - that would
| probably never meet another intelligent species (except those
| with the same ancestors).
| mariusor wrote:
| > if true, all those metrics ... are multiplied by 10^23
|
| Considering the relation of radius to volume, shouldn't we add
| a meager 3 to make the exponent a total of 26? (Assuming of
| course that the universe is just a three dimensional volume.
| :D)
| ralegh wrote:
| Wow totally forgot that... but wouldn't it be (10^23)^3 =
| 10^69!?
| mariusor wrote:
| You're right, I forgot my exponentiation rules: https://mat
| hinsight.org/exponentiation_basic_rules#power_pow...
| ta1243 wrote:
| nice...
| deepsun wrote:
| The problem is in words "at present". There's no some global
| timeline to say "present". The time in far away places just
| didn't happen yet.
|
| UPDATE: minor consideration -- time can flow at different
| speeds (e.g. gravitational wells). That's probably doesn't
| matter to our discussion, but just another argument against "at
| present".
| rspoerri wrote:
| Just because you dont see it, doesnt mean it didnt happen.
| The light the sun emits will only be seen by us ~8min later,
| but it's still being emitted right now.
| deepsun wrote:
| No, there's a mistake in the statement.
|
| Counter-example -- what's happening _right now_ at a
| distance of 20 billion light-years from us?
|
| Or another question -- what happened 1 hour _before_ the
| Big Bang?
|
| Both questions are already invalid by themselves.
|
| UPDATE: I should've tried to answer my questions to show
| what I mean:
|
| 1. At 20B ly from us there's no space nor time to talk
| about. Physicists talk in formulas, and I suspect if I knew
| how, I just wouldn't be able to come up with a formula to
| formulate my question.
|
| 2. "before" the Big Bang there was no time itself to say
| "before".
|
| In other words, we can only reason about, or imagine,
| reason about things, within our light cones. Outside light
| cone questions become invalid to ask.
| foobarian wrote:
| Can't we imagine a bag of clocks at the Big Bang origin
| that were synchronized and allowed to travel in all
| directions along with various sections of the ejecta,
| including one on Earth? One could imagine events that
| happen at the same clock reading as ours in all the
| different parts of the visible and non-visible universe.
| riotnrrd wrote:
| The effects of relativity cause that thought experiment
| to fall apart quickly. I build two clocks, and send one
| to alpha centauri and back in a spaceship. When the
| travelling clock gets back to Earth it will be showing a
| different time (because of time dilation during
| acceleration). What does "the same clock reading" mean
| then?
| petsfed wrote:
| Sort of.
|
| The concept of simultaneity is mind-bending when you really
| dig into it [0]. The upshot is that the hard problem of
| synchronizing distributed systems is a problem of
| fundamental physics, rather than simply the capabilities of
| any given developer. Its always nice to know that the
| reason you haven't met some specification given to you by a
| non-technical user representative is because meeting that
| specification violates the known laws of physics.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
| layer8 wrote:
| > the pre-inflation size of the universe was approximately
| equal to the speed of light times its age
|
| What is the basis of this assumption? Why should the universe
| be (initially) expanding at the speed of light?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Even if intelligent life were rare enough to only appear once
| per knowable universe, there could be 10^23 different
| intelligent species
|
| The search space of complex organic molecules grows
| exponentially with size. All that difference creates is some
| marginal space between molecules with hundreds of monomers and
| hundreds of monomers + some 4 or 8 where life could fit that.
|
| Your revision of 10^70 makes it a little bit more believable.
| But I wouldn't expect at all that to happen.
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| Interesting, I thought it was only Guth that introduced
| inflation.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| I love the end of it, just a big circle of random static noise.
| Looking at stuff like this always brings up the question of why
| does anything exist at all?
| kromem wrote:
| The counterpoint to that thought is why we should think non-
| existence is even possible. There doesn't seem to be any
| indication that nothing could exist other than our capacity to
| imagine it being so.
|
| It's what's so annoying with people arguing about "something
| from nothing."
|
| Even a vacuum has zero point energy. The idea that there could
| even be 'nothing' at any point in time is arguably a bigger
| leap of faith than the notion of some deity for whose sake it
| is being argued as a presupposition.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| "Something from nothing" is a flawed argument, I agree. It's
| just like saying everything came from , because
| 'nothing' doesn't represent anything at all.
|
| However, the idea that "'nothing' is impossible" still
| doesn't make sense to me. If the reality allows for infinite
| possibilities then one of the possibilities must be of
| 'nothingness'. This is what Buddhists argue, that reality is
| sunya or 0/null/void, and that we exist only momentarily in
| this nothingness somehow but you can see how that argument is
| flawed too.
|
| Then comes samkhya that says there are 2 entities: The
| observer and the thing which is being observed. The observer
| (individual consciousness or purusa) is eternal, has no point
| of origin and no end. Similarly, prakrti or nature also
| exists at the same time because the observer needs an
| observation but prakrti's nature is to change all the time,
| it manifests and unmanifests (just like our bodies or
| everything else in this universe made of dead matter).
| However, even though prakrti keeps this constant of change,
| the observer or purusa himself is unchanging (just like how
| our bodies and every single cell in it keep changing but the
| sense of 'I' remains the same somehow). On top of that, it
| says the prakrti and purusa are mutually exclusive. They do
| not mix like oil and water but remain in contact at the same
| time, just like how we have material bodies that keep
| changing but the 'I' or the observer inside it is not made of
| prakrti and hence remains detached from it. It is only the
| false-ego (or false-'I') of purusa that forces it to identify
| itself with prakrti (like I'm a male, I have this job, this
| is my family, I have this body and face, etc.).
| non-chalad wrote:
| It's really simple.
|
| The universe is based on Murphy's 1st Law: Anything can go
| wrong, including nothing.
|
| _" In the beginning there was nothing... Then something
| went wrong."_
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| Sounds good!
| vbezhenar wrote:
| If something's not reachable with speed of light, it exists
| only in one's imagination.
|
| If something's not emitting any information (black hole
| insides), it exists only in one's imagination.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| If something is in imagination, where exactly does it
| exist? What plane and what dimension? Where is it situated
| and what's the extent of it?
|
| "It's all in your head" might be one answer but that's the
| question, what plane or dimension is it? and why do we not
| see it anywhere externally?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Funny, just today I read about things like waves or
| energy being arguably on a "different plane of existence"
| than their medium/embodiment :
|
| http://www.av8n.com/physics/black-box.htm#sec-plane-of-
| exist...
|
| (Which made me realize how little I know about eastern
| mysticism...)
| mistermann wrote:
| Did atoms exist before they were discovered, or not until
| after they were discovered?
|
| This question could be applied to a number of things
| historically, and may even be in effect going forward.
| kromem wrote:
| Reachable with the speed of light from what inertial frame?
|
| Also, there's been some interesting progress regarding
| information about the inside of the black hole possibly
| leaking out in the Hawking radiation.
| wiml wrote:
| The speed of light is the same in all inertial frames.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Distances are not.
| ddj231 wrote:
| The issue is that even in your framing "...'nothing' at any
| point in time..." is at odds with the Big Bang theory which
| says time had a beginning. How do you conceive what was there
| 'before' the universe came to existence? (In the absence of
| matter, space, time and energy)
| kromem wrote:
| That's a common misconception. The big bang theory _does
| not_ say that there wasn 't stuff before the big bang.
|
| Simply that our local version of spacetime expanded in the
| great inflation.
|
| And I'm not sure if you've been following the news on it,
| but there's some serious issues with the theory at the
| moment.
| pixl97 wrote:
| It doesn't matter which 'serious issues' exist, no one
| has any explanation for why the future points to a high
| entropy version while the past point to a low entropy
| version. You can have issue with any particular issue of
| the big bang theory, but no matter what you put forth you
| have to answer the very hard question of 'why was entropy
| low', being that we know of no way in our current
| universe to reset entropy.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You mean stuff like this?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_inflation
|
| People don't spend much time on those theories because
| they are inherently of little practical consequence. What
| includes that they are also not clearly testable.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| Even physics has limits because our physical reality and
| approach has limits. Not everything can be a controlled
| experiment, especially things that are way beyond what
| our senses allow.
|
| So in the end, everybody's theory holds 'almost' the same
| weight. We're all clueless, yay!
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| The Prime Mover is a philosophical paradox even quite a bit
| older than postmodern physics.
| paulrouget wrote:
| I think it's some sort of a reference to the CMB.
| kaashif wrote:
| What kind of answer could even possibly answer that question?
|
| Any answer is subject to the follow-up question, well why does
| that thing exist? Why did that happen?
|
| If a question cannot be answered, there's no point in asking it
| I think.
|
| Other questions about the physical laws governing the big bang
| or inflation or black holes can be answered, although they
| might be very difficult to answer.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| > What kind of answer could even possibly answer that
| question?
|
| I don't know, but it's fascinating to think about.
| ddj231 wrote:
| The question is the launch off point for exploration. Just
| because a question is philosophical in nature does not mean
| it cannot be answered or that there's no point in asking.
| kaashif wrote:
| > Just because a question is philosophical in nature does
| not mean it cannot be answered or that there's no point in
| asking.
|
| I never made any claim starting from the premise that the
| question "is philosophical"
|
| I directly explained why the question can't be answered
| definitively.
|
| Lots of philosophical questions actually can be answered.
| gwill wrote:
| >If a question cannot be answered, there's no point in asking
| it I think.
|
| how can you prove a question cannot be answered?
| kaashif wrote:
| This particular question cannot be answered definitively
| because any answer is subject to the same question - why
| does that thing exist rather than nothing?
| mistermann wrote:
| > Any answer is subject to the follow-up question, well why
| does that thing exist? Why did that happen?
|
| Various kinds of faith (religious, scientific, etc) can stop
| infinite regress.
|
| > If a question cannot be answered, there's no point in
| asking it I think.
|
| Easy peasy.
| kaashif wrote:
| Faith can stop you asking the question of why God exists
| rather than nothing, but it can't actually answer that
| question.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| The moment we ask why, it has to have a reason. However
| Vedanta for example, would argue that brahman or the
| entity that is the cause of all causes, is causeless in
| itself. There can be no other explanation.
|
| If something has a cause then it's ruled by cause and
| effect. If something is causeless, it not only does not
| need a reason to exist but is also the entity that puts
| forth cause and effect in motion. Kinda similar to
| Aristotle's concept of the prime mover.
| mistermann wrote:
| It can certainly answer it, but whether it can answer it
| accurately is another matter.
|
| To make it even trickier: it isn't only religious people
| who are affected by faith, though clever word play,
| cultural norms, etc can make it appear otherwise.
| kimbernator wrote:
| I believe it's valuable to think of this question in terms of
| how our physical reality really can't answer it. It's a tacit
| acknowledgement that the rules of the physical world we exist
| in are not universal; We live with causality, but for
| existence to begin it must not be a universal requirement.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| Eastern philosophy understood it quite early, you can only
| go so far with cause and effect.
|
| Brahman, Prime mover, are great explanations as to why
| there must be a causeless entity, something that is not
| ruled by material nature in order to be the causeless
| source of it. The cause of all causes that is causeless
| itself.
| czbond wrote:
| Is the static noise just the edge of observable universe? That
| was unclear to me
| blowski wrote:
| TIL - All humans stood on top of each other would be
| significantly taller than the diameter of the Sun.
| prmph wrote:
| Cool.
|
| And yet all humans alive, if packed like sardines, will fit in
| a 1 mile cube, with room to spare.
|
| Physical dimensions can be an amazing un-intuitive thing.
| blowski wrote:
| Gosh, you're right.
|
| Assuming:
|
| - 5,250 can stand front to back
|
| - 3,500 side-by-side
|
| - 750 on top of each other
|
| That's more than 13 billion humans you could fit in said
| cube.
| swader999 wrote:
| That would get pretty stinky though.
| blowski wrote:
| The "What If?" books by Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame)
| cover topics like this with that kind of thought process.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Also pretty hot, since if I remember correctly, the waste
| heat of a human is higher per volume (or was that mass ?)
| than of the sun !
| ninkendo wrote:
| And if you took each atom of all the humans alive and stacked
| them in a line (assuming 1 angstrom per atom and 7E17 atoms
| in a human), it would be roughly 60 light years long.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| The many ways that protein can fold.
| non-chalad wrote:
| Give every human an acre of land, and we'd all easily fit
| into Texas.
| slingnow wrote:
| There are 8 billion people on earth. And Texas is 172
| million acres. I don't think the math works out.
| ghkbrew wrote:
| We (the humans) would fit into Texas regardless of
| whether the land we owned would ;-)
| newprint wrote:
| One of the best things I have seen on HN. Thank you for the link
| and who ever build this !
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| I never knew that a minecraft world was bigger than Neptune. Very
| neat.
|
| What I find more interesting is when you get to the subatomic
| layer when it becomes apparent that it's all just theory and we
| have no idea what's actually here and we could be wrong but have
| no way of knowing...yet.
| throwcults wrote:
| Death cults would be shocked to know this
| hans_castorp wrote:
| I also like this site to show the scale of the universe:
|
| https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....
| nthdesign wrote:
| Neal Agarwal (Neal.Fun) did something similar a while back with
| cool WebGL effects. https://neal.fun/size-of-space/
| hypertexthero wrote:
| Warmly recommended version of the same thing in meditative video
| game form: Everything
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(video_game)
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| Has this been done with time rather than distance? I've always
| thought it could be a neat way to explore historical topics or
| quickly get a perspective on certain time periods.
| JamesHist wrote:
| https://www.historytimeline.com/timeline/universe/
| roamerz wrote:
| The gray stuff. Is that where the Level Designers haven't yet
| created the environment for us to play in?
|
| Seriously though as hard as the size of the universe is to
| comprehend, the gray stuff is exponentially more mysterious to
| me.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| I always want to see something like this but within the scope of
| the earth across time.
| niek_pas wrote:
| Is the scrolling on mobile way too sensitive for anyone else?
| AnonC wrote:
| Not only too sensitive, but it also seems to have a mind of its
| own. I gave up after trying to move around for a few seconds. I
| was already disappointed that it wouldn't load without having
| to disable all tracker/analytics blocking.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| This is all a simulation, folks. The "universe", not the website.
| I mean, the website is inside the simulation, so it's technically
| a simulation of the simulation it lives in...
| dhosek wrote:
| Something I recently posted on Bluesky in response to someone
| complaining about the exaggerated vertical scale of a relief map
| of the US:
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/dahosek.bsky.social/post/3kqfzyvoz5...
|
| > It's worth noting that the coast-to-coast measure of the US is
| a bit under 3000 miles, while the highest elevation in the
| continental US is a bit under 3 miles above sea level, so in a
| 1000-pixel map, that would translate to a 1 pixel height for Mt
| Whitney!
|
| > So that difference in elevation is less than the diameter
| difference of the earth due to its rotation! A billiard ball has
| a diameter of 2in and the variation in the earth's diameter
| scaled to that level would be 0.0066in which is smaller than a
| dust mite.
|
| > I should also point out that the diagrams that show the earth's
| elliptical orbit are also a lie. Drawn correctly proportioned,
| the earth's orbit is indistinguishable from a circle to the naked
| eye. (And don't get me started on the pictures that overstate the
| size of sun & planets vs their orbits).
|
| > The universe is huge, we are tiny.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| How would you determine if the Universe is finite or infinite?
| nelblu wrote:
| Similar app from https://kurzgesagt.org/ for phones:
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kurzgesagt...
|
| https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/universe-in-a-nutshell/id15263...
|
| What's interesting is that they both chose very similar music.
| Are they somehow related that I am unaware of?
| savageDude__ wrote:
| Love the fact that the known universe is much more smaller
| (10^-35) than it is bigger (10^27) from our chosen baseline.
| jpeter wrote:
| https://htwins.net/scale2/
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